English Houses 1300-1800

Vernacular Architecture, Social Life

Matthew. H Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317868637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Houses are more than a shelter from the elements: they also offer an unparalleled insight into the beliefs, ideas and experiences of the people who built and lived in them.

In this engaging book, Matthew Johnson looks at the traditional houses that still exist throughout the English countryside and examines the lives of the ordinary people who once occupied them. His wide-ranging narrative takes in the medieval hall and the community it framed; the rebuilding and 'improvement'of houses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the rise of the Georgian Order in both architecture and eighteenth century culture.

This passionate book is animated by the conviction that old houses are much more than just pretty tableaux of an idyllic, unchanging rural England. Vernacular houses are compared to their larger, 'polite' counterparts, and English houses are placed in the wider context of the British Isles and the Atlantic world beyond. The result is a dynamic, compelling account of the development of houses in the English countryside and through this, a portrait of changing patterns of social life from medieval to modern times.

Richly illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings, this book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the significance of our built heritage and the historic landscape.

1
Introduction: The Study of Vernacular Architecture

Every weekend, thousands of people, mostly from the towns and suburbs of England, engage in the most innocent of pursuits – a visit to the countryside. Picturesque villages and country landscapes within convenient driving distance of a major city are the destination of families and individuals seeking a few hours’ respite from the stresses of urban living.

Visitors, driving and walking around the regions of England, see that not all English houses are the same. The houses and other buildings that make up rural landscapes vary in obvious ways in their choice of building materials, and also more subtly in their style and decoration, and their size and form. Observers soon recognise that this variation is not just a random jumble, with each house varying from the next in a merely haphazard way. Rather, there are certain patterns to be discerned in the local landscape and architecture: concentrations of different kinds of building in particular areas, use of particular roofing and walling materials, different architectural styles. These patterns must surely mean something; they must surely tell us something about the history of the household, community and region.

If our visitors look more carefully at the facades of houses as they walk past, they can begin to speculate about the stories they have to tell (Plates 1 to 4). This house has a steeply pitched roof – it may have been thatched before the thatch was replaced with ceramic tiles, the steep pitch being needed in earlier times to facilitate rain-water running off the thatch. That house has one end much higher than the other end. Could one end have been rebuilt, and if so why? This next house has a date and initials above the door. Does this date mark the initial construction of the house or does it date from a later improvement? And why is there a pair of initials, or maybe two Christian names, either side of a surname – what does this tell us about relations between the married couple? Taken together, these differences may proffer stories: the timber-framed and plastered fronts of irregular houses may give way, over time, to more strikingly regular and symmetrical Georgian brick facades.

Our visitor stands back and surveys the scene as a whole. Perhaps the houses are clustered tightly round a green, a church in their midst; perhaps they are more dispersed, isolated even. In much of England, the countryside does not conform to the stereotype of the classic ‘English village’ familiar from Agatha Christie novels and TV adaptations, with a church, manor and village houses in a cluster surrounded by arable fields; rather, it is a dispersed scatter of small hamlets or isolated farmsteads. And this difference in settlement form between this and that region is not random or trivial – it is linked to very deep differences between local communities, and to subtle variations in the history of human settlement, variations whose origins are often at least a thousand years old. The location of houses in the landscape, then, has as much to tell us as their form and decoration.

Clearly, our visitor rapidly recognises that the story of the houses that make up the village is not one of an unchanging rural idyll. The village, and the individual houses within it, have been transformed through the centuries. Non-local building materials could not have arrived before the transport revolution of the eighteenth century. Houses bear marks of alteration and updating in line with contemporary tastes and standards.

Different patterns can also be seen at a regional level. To travel between different regions of England is to traverse different zones of building styles, different forms of houses, set within different kinds of landscape. These differences between regions are partly conditioned by material factors – the underlying variations in geology conditioning the availability of good building stone, or proximity to woodland. Others relate to human geography – the proximity of London or a major regional centre, ease of access to major routeways. Still others, however, are the products of local choice: ordinary people, whether acting as individuals, or as part of households or communities, choosing to do things differently.

Many of these differences between houses are not immediately obvious to the casual visitor, but become apparent on close inspection. Live in a region of England for even a few months and look at local buildings closely and critically, and the visitor will quickly come to see differences between this dale and the next, this county and the next, in features that are often, at a first and superficial glance, arbitrary choices – decorative schemes, the manner of laying stone or bricks, the panel infills of timber frames.

Houses and People

This book is aimed in part at those who perhaps on casual visits to the countryside have already seen different patterns of traditional houses, and who want to know more about old houses, what these patterns might mean, what they might tell us about the history of the English landscape and the men, women and children who dwelt in that landscape.

The book has a very simple message: houses are about human beings. Architecture is a human creation, the medium and outcome of people acting on their surroundings. The form of smaller houses, then, can tell us about the lives of the ordinary people who built them and who lived in them. They are artefacts that should be understood as part of the way ordinary people lived and thought. They tell us about those lives and thoughts in often very profound and complex ways.

Many books on houses concentrate on changing architectural styles – Perpendicular, Renaissance, Palladian. This story is a fascinating one, and aspects of it will be retold in the pages that follow. However, somewhere in this cascading narrative of styles and influences the people seem to be forgotten. Such books often also concentrate on the houses of those at the very top of the social structure – the gentry and aristocracy. Where the houses of the middle classes are considered, the concentration is on the cities and towns rather than the countryside. Again, it is often forgotten that, before the Industrial Revolution, over four-fifths of the English lived in the countryside, and were not of such elevated social status.

Other books do concentrate on the ordinary houses of lesser people, but wax lyrical on changing building materials and technologies – brickwork, cruck types, scarf joints, ashlar coursing. Still others discuss economic factors behind housebuilding – changing farming practices, agricultural improvement, dairy production, the cloth and iron industries. All these themes are important, and all will be explored in the pages that follow, but in the end they are only a means to an end. The one true end of the study of old houses is to understand something of the ways of life and systems of thought of their builders, owners and users.

Those ways of life were very different from our own. The houses we see today appear quite familiar; the descriptive words we use often have an Anglo-Saxon plainness to them – farmhouse, stable, kitchen, barn, byre. The past, however, is a foreign country, and this apparent plainness conceals just how very different that past was. These houses were built to accommodate ways of living very different from those of the twenty-first century. These different ways of living related to very different systems of belief in terms of how a household was ordered, the different roles of women, men, children and servants, the husbandry of the fields beyond. Houses, then, relate to different cultural attitudes. The everyday movement from house to barn and byre and back again, the milking of cows and labour in the fields, the daily gathering around the table for mealtimes – all these very simple and everyday actions expressed a deep understanding of the world.

This book will ask questions about those past men, women and children who lived in houses that survive today in the English countryside. I have already shown that we can already begin to make guesses about these people by wandering around villages and landscapes with an observing eye and an enquiring mind. In the chapters that follow, I will begin to flesh out some of these guesses about what houses meant into firmer ideas. I will set these casual observations against a closer inspection of the houses themselves, against other documentary and archaeological evidence for past people, and against a wider picture of historical change at regional, national and international scales.

The Study of Vernacular Houses

The study of smaller traditional buildings is not new. Though the term ‘vernacular’ as applied to buildings dates to the later nineteenth century, the origins of the historical study of buildings can be sought in the perceived loss of ‘tradition’ itself, at the end of the eighteenth century. Many writers and intellectuals of the time, both radical and conservative, reacted with horror to the rapid changes in the world around them: the Industrial Revolution, the enclosure and privatisation of the formerly open fields, the ‘dark satanic mills’, and the mass migration from countryside to the growing urban centres.

This horrified reaction expressed itself in a sense of loss: that an older, pre-industrial way of life was passing away, and that the advance of industry was destroying something valuable and authentic, something that needed to be preserved. It thus led to the desire of nineteenth-century antiquarians to study what was being lost, and to the birth of the conservation movement. One of the earliest examples was the 1830s protest of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth against what he saw as the deformation of the Lake District by over-grand building, follies, and white roughcast, together with conifers and exotics: ‘Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes. This is in the course of things; but why should the genius that directed the ancient architecture of the vales have deserted them? For the bridges, churches, mansions, cottages, and their richly fringed and flat-roofed outhouses, venerable as the grange of some old abbey, have been substituted structures, in which baldness only seems to have been studied, or plans of the most vulgar utility’ (de Selincourt ed. 1906, 65). Romanticism as an intellectual and literary movement expressed a powerful sense of loss, and of opposition to modern ways of ‘vulgar utility’. This opposition between aesthetics on the one hand and utility on the other went on to constitute a central formative influence on the study of vernacular architecture.

Early nineteenth-century Romanticism fed into Victorian thinking on architecture, the arts, design and material culture. Such thinking took both conservative and radical forms, and could be found equally on the political Left as on the Right. A powerful link was argued between a ‘medieval’ or pre-industrial way of life that involved a sense of community and closeness to Nature on the one hand and the technical and aesthetic principles of hand-made ‘medieval’ art and individually designed architecture on the other. Both were seen by many Victorians to relate to a sense of community and a more human, less alienated way of ordering human affairs that had been lost with industrialisation. The study of earlier forms of art and architecture, then, became for the Victorian mind a moral and political, as much as an historical, exercise. To contemplate a medieval building was not simply to look at something beautiful, it was also to contemplate a way of living, an ordering of human communities, whose passing was to be mourned. This moral imperative lay behind, for example, A.W.N. Pugin’s Gothic designs (Hill 2007), John Ruskin’s patient recording and explication of Gothic architecture in his great work The Stones of Venice (Ruskin 1884) and behind the Victorian ‘restoration’ of so many medieval churches, both great and small. The Oxford Movement linked veneration of the values of medieval Catholic religion, of architectural forms, and of a sense of tradition and community, in a single conservative political vision.

The classic example of such thinking and its application to architecture and material culture was the career of the socialist thinker and craftsman William Morris. Morris’ understanding of socialism was expressed through his designs and his books. These celebrated the craft traditions and methods of production that, he felt, had been destroyed by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Morris developed a narrative of the rise and fall of the medieval craft traditions, a narrative that served as a condemnation of industrial patterns of production. He was the founder and the most prominent member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded in 1877 (Miele ed. 1996, 37).

Much of this Victorian thinking concentrated on the great monuments and styles of the medieval period, most obviously the great cathedrals and churches, rather than focusing on vernacular architecture and culture as such. However, it is important to remember that nineteenth-century academic journals such as the Archaeological Journal and Antiquaries Journal grouped a wide range of objects of study under the term ‘archaeology’, including items of folk culture and other old artefacts (see Ebbatson 1994). In many ways, the bifurcation and academic division between different disciplines (archaeology, architectural history, folklife studies) occurred after this period; in bringing these strands back together in the modern study of vernacular architecture, scholars are going back to first principles.

Two great books, published at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, can be seen as laying the intellectual foundations of the systematic study of vernacular houses. S.O. Addy brought an understanding of that other great Victorian theme – evolution, as expressed in the thought of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin – to vernacular architecture in his Evolution of the English House (1898). Addy argued that the form of houses had evolved in parallel with the evolution of human societies, with, he believed, earlier circular houses characteristic of matrilineal societies giving way to more modern rectangular forms indicative of male-dominated societies. In so doing he was following earlier schema of social evolution proposed by Morgan and Maine and adopted by, among others, the associate of Marx, Friedrich Engels, in his classic Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Addy also related the system of the structural division of early houses into bays to the need to stall pairs of oxen, one pair to each bay, and saw the stalling of oxen in this way as fundamental to the Germanic origins of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ways of living. C.F. Innocent took as his theme different building techniques in his Development of English Building Construction (1916). Innocent drew on his observations of cruck-framed buildings to insist on the antiquity of vernacular buildings and the evidence for pre-industrial building techniques found within them.

The early twentieth-century development of interest in vernacular buildings in England was rather different from that in other countries. In much of continental Europe and Scandinavia, peasant culture, and with it rural and vernacular tradition, was seen as something living and ongoing rather than something that had been irrevocably lost with the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. Rural society and culture, then, was studied as part of a living tradition, or at least as only having been eroded or threatened in the very recent past. As a result, a tradition of folklife study was often much stronger in these areas (Dorson 1972). A stronger tradition of folklife studies can also be seen in other areas of the British Isles, in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

After the Second World War, there was a rapid expansion in England of interest in medieval and postmedieval archaeology, vernacular architecture and related themes. Much of this work must be seen in the context of postwar culture in general, in particular the Fabian reformist socialism of the postwar Labour government and an ideological commitment to the scholarly exploration of the lives of ordinary people in the past, rather than the kings, queens and princes of elite political history. Such an ideological commitment was seen most obviously at the Wharram Percy project on the Yorkshire Wolds, where from the 1950s onwards several of the peasant houses of the deserted medieval village were excavated (Johnson 2007, 104–8). The Vernacular Architecture Group was founded in 1952. This period also saw a marked expansion in extra-mural and other classes, and in amateur local history and archaeology societies. The study of vernacular buildings was perfect work for such groups. The recording and analysis of houses did not need the logistical support or have the constraints of an excavation; valuable work could be done on a Sunday afternoon, more often than not accompanied by the genial house owner’s offer of a cup of tea, and, with luck, a biscuit.

Intellectual Foundations

Taken together, it could be argued that three scholars – an anthropologist, an archaeologist, and an historian – laid the foundations of the modern study of vernacular architecture. The historian W.G. Hoskins wrote a short but enormously influential article in the left-wing historical journal Past and Present, ‘The Rebuilding of Rural England 1570–1640’ (Hoskins 1953). Hoskins proposed that there had been a revolution in housing standards between these two dates, and tied this revolution in to contemporary economic and social changes. He gave potential students of vernacular architecture a narrative, a sense of how individual buildings related to a wider story about the English landscape, which he set out in lucid and passionate terms in his classic The Making of the English Landscape (Hoskins 1955). We shall see in Chapter 4 that Hoskins’ vision is now partly out of date, but it has been enormously influential, particularly in its impact on historians’ perception of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as being of rising affluence and assertiveness in the culture of the middling sort of people.

If Hoskins suggested a historical model, Sir Cyril Fox and Lord Raglan demonstrated the method: they showed how the study of vernacular houses could be undertaken in their three-volume study Monmouthshire Houses (Fox and Raglan 1951–4). Fox and Raglan looked at houses carefully within the county of Monmouthshire, utilising drawn and measured ground plans, and building a picture of vernacular architecture in a given region. (Though now part of the county of Gwent in Wales, Monmouthshire sits on the border with England and enjoys an English as well as a Welsh heritage.) Monmouthshire Houses was, typically for the study of vernacular buildings, an interdisciplinary and a professional–amateur collaboration. Raglan was an unorthodox figure; he is classified in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as an anthropologist. He was interested in the anthropological study of myth and its relationship to ritual. Dismissed by many as an eccentric amateur, a more charitable view is that he prefigured anthropology’s structuralist turn by twenty years. Fox was an archaeologist and curator of the National Museum of Wales. He was central to the foundation of St Fagan’s open-air museum near Cardiff, one of the finest collections of reconstructed vernacular buildings in the British Isles.

The success of Hoskins, Fox and Raglan can be judged by the prolife...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates, Figures and Maps
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The Study of Vernacular Architecture
• 2. Building Traditional Houses
• 3. Houses in the Landscape
• 4. Houses in the Later Middle Ages
• 5. Rebuilding and Reformation
• 6. Polite and Rustic
• 7. Everyday Life in the Traditional House
• 8. The Georgian Order
• 9. Conclusions
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates